Maybe it's true that you only learn to meditate when you're in so much pain that breathing in and out is the only thing you have to count on. And running? Are you truly a runner when you know that every run is your first run and getting out of the house is every time a miracle? Carl Jung says that the psyche of the world hangs by a thread: the conscious act of one person can save us all.

And writing? I watched my mother long for writing her whole life, getting bogged down in two major projects: the story of Howie, the brave hemophiliac boy she tutored in math; and later of her great-grandfather, enscripted into the Union Army; exhausting himself selling off his farm in Pennsylvania and moving his family into town; dying of pneumonia, the unused uniform hanging on his bedpost.

Mama turns ninety-five at the end of this month; at the moment she's surprised by how hard it is to be blind and dependent; writing is now just another thing that defeated her along the way.

So, it remains for me to do it, barefoot and more than half her age, I can write six lines a day. I must walk over the gleaming coals only as I see others do it, making it look simple. At the library, I can go online to my writing blog and watch them walk on beds of nails like a walk in a park, their feet tough; they only acknowledge pain when warning others of dog shit and glass in the grass.

Today, on my way to the library, a woman with a long cigarette holder suddenly handed me some cash and a pair of size 5 sneakers. My mother's size and mine. I picked up my pace and headed straight for the library to find a writer named Lapham.